Dr. Tomas Gedeon

Professor,  Dept. of Mathematical Sciences

My recent work has been focused on two core areas of Mathematical Biology: Neuroscience and Systems Biology.

Neuroscience.

Neural coding.

I am interested in how the sensory information is represented by the collection of sensory neurons. In collaboration with John P. Miller and Alex Dimitrov from Dept. of Cell Biology and Neuroscience we have developed a mutual information based methods for clustering of input-output neural data. This method is closely related to the Information Bottleneck method. 

Fluid-structure interaction in cercal system.

 We have developed several fluid-structure interaction models needed for simulation of mechanoreceptory sensory organs in crickets. The cercal system consists of two cone-like appendages at the rear end of the cricket that are covered by about 1000 stiff filiform hairs. These hairs respond to the air movement and their movement is encoded into neural signals. We are interested in viscous coupling of the hairs through the interaction with the surrounding air. How does the placement and mechanical behavior of the hairs affect the function of the system? How did the evolution  shaped the distribution and the properties of the hairs? 

Systems Biology.

I am interested in gene regulation and how the dynamics affects  function and robustness of the corresponding circuit. With my collaborators we have studied dynamics of the NCR circuit in yeast, the behavior of the general Shea-Ackers models and the dynamics of the phage lambda decision circuit.

I am also very interested in synchronization of the periodic gene expression in populations of cells. Such synchronization occurs in many systems including somitogenesis during development, cell cycle synchronization in yeast and in quorum sensing bacteria Vibrio fischeri.

Mathematics.

I am involved in development of mathematical ideas related to  systems biology and neuroscience. These include analytical tools to study  cyclic feedback systems, controlled monotone systems and delay-differential equations. I am also interested in data processing tools and computational tools related to Conley index theory.

Education.

B.S, M.Sc.  in Mathematics, Comenius University, Bratislava, Czechoslovakia 1989.

 Ph.D.  in Mathematics, Georgia Institute of Technology, 1994.

Post-doc:  Northwestern University 1994-95.

Activities.

Associate Editor Discrete and Continuous Dynamical Systems B.

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